


Humming

by schmevil



Series: Chimera [1]
Category: Smallville
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Reality, Gen, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-28
Updated: 2010-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-06 18:28:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmevil/pseuds/schmevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they've tried and tried, and all failed, then they will need him. (Lex waits for rescue).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Humming

**Author's Note:**

> First of two variations on a theme.

His father taught him many useful things and among them was the kind of patience that's necessary in these kinds of situations. He'll wait, as long as it's necessary and then he'll be done with waiting forever.

This moment isn't clouded with portents and intimations of a destiny muddled, found or usurped. Unlike all the moments that led to this one – it simply is. He simply is.

His elbows balance on his knees, his hands hang between his legs, and the curve of his back is gentle – he is the picture of relaxed confidence. It is the absence of tension that speaks most heavily. The distance between his skin, the end of his flesh, and the walls, the ends of his cell is wide and unsubtle. The way only black cloth and the leather of his soles touch the floor, and never the flesh they contain, is telling. If only someone here could understand the language.

The wide stripe of pale skin revealed in the space between glove and shirtsleeve is hairless and smooth, not raised in goosebumps, despite the cold. Swirling from his lips, hot air is caught in the fast, chill currents that permeate this place. It is slowly dragged from him – he should labour for breath, but his chest moves in a strong rhythm. Other than that, he is still.

The guards watch him closely for some protest – he's not a quiet or easy prisoner – but they are disappointed. The older one, shorter and thickly built, fingers his weapon lovingly and stares at him through the glittering energy barrier. Bars he thinks, would have been nice. He could touch bars, if he wanted. Run a cup along them, if he had one, and make a kind of jangling music. The younger guard hums under her breath but never breaks from her rigid posture. They don't consider music to be a breach of discipline.

They have a saying – as law, harmony – that he turns over and over in his mind. For weeks now, he's considered it. Many times he understands it, but the recognition of a puzzle solved is always followed quickly by renewed confusion. The meaning flits away, like water through cupped hands and eventually even the memory of having found the solution fades.

The scars always heal fully and cleanly. Passing time brings faster and faster reconstruction and his body learns to cure everything that comes along. Viral and bacterial infections, rot, malnutrition, abrasions and breaks are smoothed away, his cells recycled at an alarming rate and his body draws nourishment from who knows where. Certainly they don't know and he doesn't.

Perhaps some xenobiologist on a long dead world might have found in him something familiar and noted that two species were brought strangely close together by the radiation of her world's native minerals and a distant yellow star.

They still can't crossbreed, though. Star Trek was wrong about that, and about a lot of other things. He regrets that he'll never be able to rub that in, to all the Trekkies. There must be at least a few of them left. Still, it would be in bad taste.

He regrets little else.

He's not sure how to accomplish that emotion, in any large degree – he can only regret things like forgetting to turn off the television, though surely the maid has fixed that for him by now, if she still even works in his apartment. Perhaps his replacement favours a different breed of staff. Short Indian girls in French uniforms, or tall, chocolate men with gazelle-like legs. He has no way of knowing.

His parents often argued about such trivialities and he's always suspected that his mother chose her servants by colour, to match her own red hair and pale eyes. He misses the way she could fixate on the silliest of things, driven by her compulsions to reorder the artwork hanging on the walls of her suite, to follow some obscure algorithm, or a favourite quadratic equation.

He nourished his own quirks, his father once said, in memory of her. While his father said a great many intelligent and extremely accurate things in his life, in this he was wrong. The son is simply too much his parents' child and both of them creep through his veins, bursting out here and there, in the contradictions of his personality.

His father loved music with a pure and clean passion that had no rival.

He hums random bars of favoured sonatas and waltzes, but stops, when they spread like wildfire among his keepers. Human genius stripped and repackaged as one of their fads. The image of his father, playing his piano for them and directed by near-invisible strings that hook into his skin, haunts him. It sometimes seems hysterically important that he remember standing beside his father, watching and listening to him play.

They might have got along, his father and his keepers. Lionel though, would never have thought to speak to them in the only language they really understood. No one had thought to really study the music as more than an anthropological curiosity – the trouble of having such military minds control first contact. So no, Lionel would not have made the connection and they would not have gotten along.

Lex allows himself the arrogance to believe he's done the best that any human could.

Before, he'd often thought that next time, he would pull out goddamn whale song, if he had to.

Now, he sometimes catches himself doubting there will ever be a next time, or any other time. He marks these thoughts off as forbidden.

They hum, in their fashion, but don't seem to appreciate the breathy exhalations of humans – screams particularly, annoy them. He's thought of a million ways to take advantage of that fact and all the others he's learned during his interminable stay on the ship. Even through the haze that their atmosphere forced on him, he plans and schemes and makes ready for any number of outcomes. He calculates his odds of survival finely, considering the world's air forces and the chances that at least some of the costumed freaks survived the early strikes.

It is extraordinarily likely that one in particular managed to bumble through everything and still lives.

His recovery, he knows, isn't a high priority. But he will be rescued. It isn't arrogant to tell himself that eventually, they will need him. When they've tried and tried, and all failed, then they will need him.

He waits.


End file.
